Category: Memories

4406 Haskell Avenue – Introduction

October 26th, 2023
```
standing in a doorway
watching people
stepping through 
or back out
carrying things
furniture…?
perhaps
boxes…?
maybe

in this doorway 
aware of a house
aware of people
aware of the world
aware of myself

for the first time
```
This is my very first memory, that is, the earliest moment of my life that I can recall. It could very well not be, but I’m pretty certain that it’s of the day my family moved into 4406 Haskell Avenue in Encino, California sometime in 1954. I was not yet two-years-old.

It’s fitting that this first memory would be of the house I would grow up in and call home for the next twenty years.

Like almost every neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, Encino is part of the city of Los Angeles.   Roughly bordered by the I-405 on the east, the U.S. 101 on the south, Lindley Avenue on the west and Mulholland Drive on the south, Encino is nestled in the northern slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains. While half its homes are in the flats, the other half are on the twisty, serpentine streets that wind through the hills. Its name is derived from “Los Encinos,” the Spanish word for oaks.   When the Spanish Portola Expedition first explored the inland of California in 1769, it crossed the Santa Monicas via the Sepulveda Pass (where the I-405 runs) and stayed two nights at the Tongva village of Siutcanga (“the place of the oaks”). Father Juan Crespi, the Franciscan missionary traveling with the expedition, named the valley “El Valle de Santa Catalina de Bolonia de Los Encinos (The Valley of St. Catherine of Bologna of the Oaks). In 1845, the Rancho Los Encinos was carved out of San Fernando Mission lands by governor Pio Pico. Los Encinos would eventually become “Encino.” According to Wikipedia, Encino’s current population is about 45,000.

Forming a huge grid, most of the streets in the San Fernando Valley run for miles along the entire length or width of the large basin. Running north-south, Haskell is no exception. The 4400 block, however, is Haskell’s final one on the south, where the hills of the Santa Monicas begin to rise. Our street number — 4406 — was the second to last one before the street ended at its intersection with Valley Vista Blvd., which began there and wound its way east along the base of the hills. This was a block from the border with Sherman Oaks, the “town” to the east; and two blocks from the I-405.

The lots on our side of Haskell were large — 100×400 foot rectangles almost an acre in size. Ours had been subdivided into two, the back half accessed from the street by a long, narrow dirt driveway. When my parents bought this back lot in 1954, the only thing standing on it was a small, one bedroom/one bath home that perhaps had been built as a guest house. With a living room, a fireplace, a good size kitchen and a brick patio with a wisteria arbor, it was a cute little place, but hardly large enough for a family of five. Yet we all lived in it for two years before two more bedrooms, another bathroom and a second, bigger living room were added. My father and I slept in the living room while my mother and two sisters took the bedroom. During the summers, my mother put her bed on the patio and slept out there.

To a two-year-old child, our lot — 20,000 square feet – seemed like a 40-acre farm. And it didn’t take long for my father, who claimed he had always wanted to be a farmer, to begin turning it into a little agricultural oasis. There were rows of corn and strawberries. New fruit trees were planted to join the venerable ones already there.

Plowing behind my father in our back yard.

Because of its unique position inside the end of the block, our lot was bordered by seven other properties: the front half the lot (4400 Haskell), two homes on Valley Vista, three on Firmament Avenue behind us (which were technically in Sherman Oaks) and the Haskell lot next door (4408).   While this put us in kind of a fishbowl, it never felt so. This si becaue what we saw were big, deep and mostly neglected backyards. Not only were the houses unseen, so were the residents, who rarely ventured far from their homes.   The lot with which we shared the most footage (next door at 4408) was owned by an older Italian named August Bucchieri, who, like my father, was an avid gardener and had filled his yard with fruit trees and vegetables. Many a conversation with Bucchieri was held through the chain-link fence.

I have little memory of those first years on Haskell.   I remember my mother’s bed on the porch. I remember my Uncle Tex, my father’s elder brother, visiting us while in LA on business, sitting in a chair in our crowded living room/bedroom, gifting my sisters and me with half-dollars.   I remember when, my mother off on a trip to her native England, my grandmother Julia and aunt Eleanor (my father’s mother and sister) came up from Texas to take care of us. I remember the house addition going up. These memories, however, are all vague and elusive, as ephemeral as dreams.

My eldest sister was Victoria, though I knew her mostly as “Vicki.”   She was named “Victoria” because she was born on June 5, 1944, the day before the D-Day invasion. News of the successful invasion of Nazi-occupied France coming through, our parents did what many others and named their first daughter for the triumph. (Some children were unfortunately named “D-Day” – or “Deeday” Vicki was lucky our parents didn’t go that far.) In between Vicki and me was Mary, five years Vicki’s junior and three years my elder.

Moving from a relatively new tract house on Allott Avenue in Van Nuys, our parents bought the Haskell property because they wanted to get Vicki into the school at St. Cyril’s of Jerusalem, the Catholic church located a block down Haskell at Ventura Boulevard.   Vicki, Mary and I all attending St. Cyril’s through 8^th grade, the church was a key element of growing up on Haskell. In so many ways, our lives and those of our parents revolved around it, its elementary school, and the large asphalt parking lot that doubled as playground. It was at St. Cyril’s that my Anglican mother converted to Catholicism. It was at St. Cyril’s that my father conceived and set up the church library. It was where I was an altar boy, and where my Boy Scout troop was based. It was where friends and I would hang out on afternoons and weekends, playing basketball or kick ball.

For many years after we moved in, our Haskell block didn’t have sidewalks. There were just dirt paths that ran atop berms on either side of the street. Organized by my father, Haskell residents petitioned the city, claiming the street wasn’t safe for schoolchildren. The city responded by installing sidewalks, but only on Haskell, the concrete pathways ending a few dozen feet past our driveway. So while schoolchildren walking home were safely removed from traffic on that block, if they lived beyond it they had to step back out onto the street.

The lack of sidewalks – and the inconsistency as to where they were built — was typical of the San Fernando Valley in the 1950s and 1960s as it transitioned from farmland to suburbia, from rural to city. Large sections of Ventura Boulevard — the main commercial thoroughfare — had no sidewalks. Pedestrians had to navigate dirt paths, especially along the fronts of empty lots awaiting development.    Street construction was a haphazard affair and often problematic. After big rains, intersections on Ventura would flood badly. One could say there was general messiness to the area as it experienced growing pains.

Once grassland with occasional stands of oak, the San Fernando valley is now full of trees – trees planted by new residents as they moved in from the 1940s to the 1970s.     In the mid-1950s, recently planted trees hadn’t yet grown much and yards were still sparse. Indeed, there was so little plant growth between us and St. Cyril’s that we could easily see the schoolyard’s flagpole from the house. Within five years, trees had grown high enough that that view disappeared.

I will relate many memories of Haskell, but I’ll end this post with a very early one of a small event that my mother found especially amusing and would recount over the years. (This is, perhaps, why I have such a vivid recollection of it.) I was quite young – maybe three or four – and I had some playmate over, a boy my age whose identity I don’t recall at all. (I suspect he was the son of a neighbor or friend imported by my mother to keep me company. As the baby of the family, I was home while my sisters were off at school.) It was winter and it had recently rained. Armed with rubber rain boots, this boy and I had gone off exploring in the yard, oblivious to the fact that downpours had turned sections of the yard into tracts of goopy mud. When we wandered into one of these areas, I sunk down into one mucky patch to the point that my booted feet were held firm. I couldn’t move at all. I don’t know how long I flailed there, futilely trying to extract myself before my companion, who had somehow avoided being similarly mired, went and found my mother. “Chrissie stuck in the mud” he told her. She came out to find me, feet cemented, arms flapping and, by now, certainly in tears. Bravely wading across the mud to my rescue, she lifted me up and out of the wet soil that entrapped me. Only the sludge held the boots so firm that my feet came right out of them. My mother carrying me back to the house without extracting them, I don’t know how long those two little rubber boots remained, peaking up from the goop…
Remembering Gerzovich

September 3rd, 2023

Curtain call for “Servant of Two Masters.” SCU’s Lifeboat Theatre. Fall, 1972. Steve Gerzovich as harlequin Truffaldino. (Courtesy of Santa Clara University.)

I recently learned that Stephen “Gerz” Gerzovich passed away. He was my classmate and fellow Theatre Arts major at Santa Clara University (SCU) from 1970-1974. We acted together, took classes together, lived together. He was one of my closest college friends. Despite living on opposite coasts, we stayed in contact for the first five years out of school, then lost touch.   In 2010 we reconnected for a few hours when I visited him at his apartment in New York City. After that, our disconnect unfortunately resumed.

Now that I’m in my 70s, the deaths of people I know or knew are starting to become common. So it wasn’t surprising to hear of Steve’s passing. His death, however, hit harder than those of other old acquaintances from whom I had drifted. That’s because it made me reflect on just how close he and I had been, and how much he had meant to me at a seminal period in my life. As we were ultimately very different people, it was understandable that our lives went down separate paths.   But in those four critical years he and I were close companions in the great adventure of college, helping each other navigate that difficult but rewarding passage into full adulthood.    I couldn’t help but feel regret over not having stayed in contact. And I suddenly missed him.

I can’t recall the exact moment I first met Steve, but my memories of him begin with THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH, the Thorton Wilder play on which I made my acting debut on the main stage of SCU’s Lifeboat Theatre. He and I had bit ensemble parts as “Conveneers” (conventioneers) in the second act, though Steve also got to play a wooly mammoth (or some such creature) in the first.

In the next show – Joseph Heller’s WE BOMBED IN NEW HAVEN – we both had slightly larger roles. By then we were enough of a pair that people joked that we were the freshmen Laurel and Hardy. (I was tall and skinny; Steve shorter and more rotund.)   This led a fifth year-senior to cast us in her student production of THE DUMBWAITER, Harold Pinter’s one-act play about two hitmen waiting in a basement room for their next assignment. Needless to say, we were thrilled.

To us an exotic older woman, our director lived off campus in an apartment with a boyfriend. As we were now her protégés, Steve and I were welcomed to hang out at her place. Counting ourselves lucky to be included in the social circle of these older students, we eagerly did so, Steve – one of the few freshmen who had a car — driving us over there in his Pontiac Firebird. THE DUMBWAITER, however, quickly turned into a disaster. At age 18, Steve and I were completely over our heads doing Pinter, clueless about the play’s nuanced themes and absurdist elements. We were also too young and inexperienced to handle the improvisations the director had us doing, improvisations in which we explored personal feelings in order to connect with those of the characters.   Indeed, Steve became so angry and distraught during one that he threw a heavy prop at me in a genuine attempt to inflict physical harm. It was scary.   It was soon after this incident that the director, perhaps realizing she was playing with fire, abandoned the project.

You’d think that, after he tried to kill me onstage, Steve and I would fall out. But no. Ironically, it made us closer. During the semi-traumatic rehearsal process, we had revealed ourselves to each other in ways friends rarely do. And as survivors, we now had a unique bond.

Of all the many late night talks Steve and I had that freshman year, I remember one in particular in which I confessed and lamented my virginity. Steve immediately had us evaluating the female students in the theatre department and scheming as to how I might convince one of them to help me lose it. Alas, there could be no reciprocal honesty from Steve about his sexuality. A few years after graduation, he came out as gay, but he wasn’t about to do so in 1971 at a Catholic university. Sheltered and naïve as I was, I had no inkling. And when he slyly intimated that he was sexually active, I never thought it could possibly be with men as well as women.

I feel a tremendous sadness over the fact that, as close as Steve and I were, he could never reveal this side of his life. While he got the full me, I only got a part of him. I have often thought about the emotional turmoil he must have been secretly experiencing, and have wondered if his freakout at that DUMBWAITER rehearsal was a temporary eruption of the feelings he worked so hard to contain. Even sadder was that my ignorance persisted for our whole four years at Santa Clara. Come graduation, I was almost as oblivious to his true sexual identity as I had been the day I met him, this despite hints he would occasionally drop, hints I was too clueless or self-absorbed to pick up. It didn’t help that he would sometimes tell tales of heterosexual adventure, tales that might have been true… or not. This was a thing with Steve that could be as endearing as it was aggravating. With a mischievous, Cheshire Cat smile, he would spin stories with straight-face conviction, never letting on whether they had actually happened or he was pulling your leg.

By sophomore year, one could say that Steve’s and my relationship had become “comfortable.” We were good friends and knew it. There was nothing to prove, nothing to question. When I started dating a girl who wasn’t in the theatre, he never hesitated to lend me his car so I could take her out to dinner or a movie.   But he also didn’t hesitate to express his disapproval, telling me she was plain and boring.   While Steve was charming, funny, generous and supportive, he could also be catty, sometimes saying unkind things with calculated intention.

Steve was a solid student, but never an exceptional one. He had, however, a knack for making himself stand out in class. For the final project in a stage design class, he made a wax statue of Richard III that was cleaved down the middle (as if by an ax) to symbolize the character’s dysfunction. As if this wasn’t effective enough, he climaxed his presentation by taking the statue out into the theatre’s parking lot and setting it on fire. I was envious of this panache, especially given that the design I had long labored over had failed to impress our teachers.

At the end of sophomore year, Steve and I decided that, for junior year, we would get a place together off campus. We consequently didn’t sign up for on-campus housing and applied for permission to move off, a risky move given the administration, needing to keep the university’s copious dorms at full capacity, would likely say no.   Indeed, come the commencement of the school year, we were denied and arbitrarily assigned separate dorm rooms. Steve fared well, getting a room in Campisi (one of the newer dorms in a complex originally built for women) with a junior I knew well from freshman year. Not having the same good fortune, I was stuck in old, decrepit Nobili Hall with a freshman. It took a week, but I was able to transfer to the same Campisi floor as Steve, moving in with a junior who, like me, was an Angeleno. While Steve and I weren’t rooming together as planned, we had the next best thing — a short walk down a hallway from each other.

It was in the fall quarter of that junior year that Steve landed his first starring role: the harlequin “Truffaldino” in Carlo Goldoni’s commedia dell’arte SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS. With this part, Steve “arrived” as an actor in the department. Steve was never a prima donna, but, beneath a cloak of confidence, he could be a bundle of nerves and insecurities, and find fault with director or cast mates.   There was many a late night, post-rehearsal talk in which he processed.

As there was no problem living off-campus senior year, Steve and I planned to get a place together with my Campesi roommate. Come September we landed a house on O’Brien Court, a street in a funny little neighborhood tucked between factory warehouses, the railroad and a freeway. As it was only a four-block walk to the Lifeboat, our home became the theatre party house, especially on Tuesday nights, which, at SCU, were tantamount to Fridays as there were no classes on Wednesdays.

I have a lot of good memories of O’Brien Court, but my favorites are of the nights Steve and I would come home from rehearsal and have what one might call the “daily debrief.” We’d put on a record (always Steve’s choice), pour some Scotch, maybe light up a joint and talk, processing the rehearsal, evaluating the state of the show, gossiping about the theater department and laughing… a lot. At the beginning of these sessions, Steve had a way of settling into his favorite chair to preside over our meeting. He’d tuck his legs under him, beam one of his Cheshire Cat smiles and kick off the conversation with some phrase like: “Shall we begin.” If there is one image of Steve I will take to my grave, it’s of him in that chair.

When I visited him in New York in 2010, we hadn’t seen each other in almost thirty years. In town for a night before going down to Princeton to watch my son defend his dissertation, I went by Steve’s place in the morning. It was, admittedly, a little awkward until Steve made coffee and we moved into the living room, where he sat down, tucked his legs under him and gave me one of those smiles. Then we began, quickly finding the “comfortable” of our old friendship…
Balboa Island – An Introduction

July 1st, 2023

If I had a second home as a child, it was my aunt and uncle’s house on Balboa Island.

My mother’s older sister was named Evelyn. An English girl on a trip to the United States, she met a young American doctor named Philip Woodworth and married him. They ended up in Sierra Madre, a suburb of Los Angeles at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, living in a large home that doubled as medical office for Phil’s practice. At one point they bought a weekend home on Balboa Island in Newport Bay.

Once the home of the “Tongva” Native Americans, the Newport Bay estuary — located on the Orange County coast south of Los Angeles — was too shallow to ever become a true harbor. But an ocean pier built on its peninsula in the 1870s made it a successful fishing and commercial port until the end of the 19^th century, when it was eclipsed by San Pedro as the region’s primary harbor. At this point the bay was developed as a residential resort. In partnership with Henry E. Huntington and his Pacific Electric Railway (which began service to Newport in 1905), its owners dredged the bay, piling sand and silt onto peninsula and tidal islets to create the extensive small craft harbor it is still today. The largest island in that harbor, Balboa is actually two islands – “Little” and “Big” — separated by the not-so “Grand Canal.” Backing on alleys, the residential lots are short and narrow, which is why most of the homes built on them were two stories. The most admirable attribute of the island is the sidewalk that rings it. Built atop the concrete seawall that prevents ocean erosion and keeps the islands intact, this public walkway allows unimpeded views of the bay and all the island’s beaches.   The owners of the grander homes facing the water may have private boat piers, but they have to cross a public pedestrian thoroughfare to get to them.

Phil and Evelyn’s home — 122 Crystal Avenue — was on the “Little Island.” Probably built sometime in the 1920s, it was cheaply constructed beach house in which, from downstairs, you could hear the squeak of every footstep in the bedrooms above. Accessed by an exterior staircase, there was a separate apartment above the garage that opened onto the alley. The backyard consisted of a small patio off the living room and along the garage. The stucco exterior was a distinctive pink with white trim. The fact it was a beach house was acknowledged by an exterior door that opened right into the shower of the downstairs bathroom, allowing one to wash off sand without ever having to track it through the house.

Evelyn and her niece Jean Gee at front door of 122 Crystal. Courtesy of Margot Gee

When Phil ended his practice and semi-retired, he and Evelyn sold their house in Sierra Madre and made 122 Crystal their only home. On one of the piers a few short blocks away, they moored their sailboat, a blue 20-foot sloop appropriately named “The Blue Lucy.” While they would sail it to Catalina Island and down to Ensenada, the sloop was mostly used for day excursions, out through the breakwaters of harbor entrance and into the open ocean.

While it had its rich and famous residents (movie star John Wayne had a palatial home and large yacht on tiny “Bay Island”), Newport Beach in the 1960s was, for the most part, a modest, upper middle-class community.   While residents were well-off, many enough so to own boats, there was not yet any sense of ostentatious wealth. There were retirees like my aunt and uncle, weekenders, professionals with families, and young people renting the studio apartments like the one above Phil and Evelyn’s garage.

My mother and her sister were close and we spent a lot of time there. Before the 405 (the “San Diego Freeway”) was opened in the mid-1960s, we’d take the “Ventura Fwy (U.S. 101) from our Encino home to downtown LA, from there traveling on the “Santa Ana Freeway” (now Interstate 5) to Orange County. We’d exit at Jamboree Boulevard, which ran all the way to Newport and the bridge that connected Balboa with the mainland. As this was before the massive development of the Irvine Ranch, there was virtually nothing but grassland and scrub brush between the freeway and the ocean, this giving the beach community an aura of exotic remove.

My sisters and I knew Evelyn as “Auntie.” Phil was “Uncle Phil.” A great deal of tradition grew up around visits to their home, i.e. obligatory activities done daily or at least once during the stay. We always went to the same beach – the one next to the Blue Lucy’s pier.   And a visit to the beach was not complete without a swim across “the channel: ” the stretch of water — about a 100 yards wide – that ran between that side of the island and the mainland. As there was nothing but boats in slips on the mainland side, there wasn’t anything to actually swim to.   We’d mark our arrival by hanging onto a slip or a mooring rope to rest before turning around and swimming back.

(English as they were, Evelyn and my mother were avid swimmers unfazed by water temperature. Evelyn swam this channel every day, even in the dead of winter. As Rudyard Kipling said and Noel Coward made famous: “Only mad dogs and Englishman go out in the midday sun.” The same might be said of the English and cold water!)

After dinner there was the obligatory walk around the small island. The wonderful thing about the island-circling sidewalk was that it allowed you to peer into the front rooms of houses as much look out over the harbor. It was always fun to see what people were eating at their dining room tables or were watching on TV. An alternative walk was across the short bridge over the “Grand Canal” to the “Big Island” and the shops on “Main Street.”   This road – a continuation of the bridge from the mainland – was the only commercial one on the island. Interspersed between gift shops, a few restaurants and an inordinate number of realtor offices were a plethora of ice cream or sweet shops. Soft ice cream (a la Foster’s Freeze) was popular, as were frozen bananas. We’d get cones and walk up and down Main Street before heading back to Crystal. (Never an aesthetic I appreciated, not once did I get a frozen banana in all the times I visited.)

A grander evening outing required a long walk down to the ferry that ran back and forth between the Big Island and the Newport Peninsula across the Main Channel. While it had a valid transportation purpose – a motorist shortcut whereby one could avoid the long drive around the harbor – the ferry felt more like a Disneyland ride. The flat, barge-like boats carried three to four cars at a time. Pedestrians sat on the benches that lined both sides and, if I remember correctly, paid only a nickel for a one-way trip. Adjacent to the ferry terminal on the Peninsula was the “Fun Zone,” an aging arcade with game booths, a small Ferris wheel and a few other cheap rides. Next to it was the “Pavilion,” a once grand ballroom that, with its distinctive tower, was the harbor’s architectural landmark. From the ferry it was only a short walk across the narrow peninsula to the ocean and a real beach with waves.

(Next to the harbor jetty at the tip of the peninsula is “The Wedge,” the famous – and often infamous – surfing and bodysurfing spot where the unique juxtaposition of breakwater and shore can produce waves up to 30 feet high.)

Evelyn and Jean on the sloop “Blue Lucy.” Courtesy of Margot Gee.

There was, of course, ocean sailing on the Blue Lucy. As I was prone to sea-sickness, these were never excursions to which I looked forward.   Once we got beyond the jetty into open water and deep swells, I’d inevitably be hanging over the side barfing up my last meal.   Sometimes, however, I miraculously didn’t get sick and I’d have a grand time.   Uncle Phil would get out his fishing rod and run a line behind the boat, the catch almost always being “bonito,” a feisty, 12-18 inch predator fish related to tuna that, once hooked, would put up a good fight. There is a photo of me with the first bonito catch I could call my own.

I remember one time out in the ocean on the Blue Lucy when, after I had been especially sick, I curled up in my mother’s arms, she holding me until we got back into the harbor. My mother wasn’t that particularly cuddly, so this moment of physical tenderness has always stayed with me…

This, I hope, provides you with an introduction to the Balboa Island of the 1960s. More memories to come…
Margot and me

July 1st, 2023
```
Margot and me
 (cousins of a sort) 
orphaned for a week
and shanghaied
to serve as crew
on the sloop Blue Lucy  
for a Captain Bligh aunt   
who'll deliver thirty lashes of words 
then soothe the wounds 
with compresses of affection.  

Mornings we are drilled 
on marriage of wind and sail. 
Afternoons we dutifully man jib and mainsheet, 
taking turns to cry "Helms Alee"  
to come about  'neath aching blue sky 
in a giant bathtub of toy boats.   

Come night,  
rewarded with grapes to savor 
beneath luscious boughs of bougainvillea, 
then tucked, sea dog-tired, 
into twin beds, where 
lulled by fog's silence and keening horn  
I gaze upon my crew mate and think I love her 
as much as a ten-year-old can.  

Time served, 
we are released from bondage  
with payment hugs and compensation kisses  
and shipped home to families 
a thousand miles apart 
taking only sunburn, taste of salt air 
and memories 
to hold us for the unlikely time 
we meet again. 

Written March, 2015
```
Margot Gee at age 19 (right) with cousin Tammy Woodworth in a Sabot. Courtesy of Margot Gee.

A grand niece of my Uncle Phil, Margot wasn’t a true cousin. In hindsight, I realize now that my Aunt Evelyn — hosting Margot for a week and worried she’d be bored — arranged with my mother to have me shipped down to Balboa as an almost-same-age companion. Evelyn provided us two children with an amazingly structured “sailing school.” In the morning there was classroom instruction around the dining room table. In the afternoon was the actual sailing in the harbor, first on a Sabot (a small sailing dinghy) borrowed from a neighbor, then on the Blue Lucy, where rotating roles as pilot and crew were sharply defined. This nautical education was so rich that it’s stuck with me to this day. I haven’t sailed much since then, but every time I have those lessons I received as 10-year-old have come back to serve me. That whole week has similarly stuck with me, Thus why one day I was compelled to write this poem about it.
Where are you, Betty Schafer?

June 26th, 2023

I wrote this sometime during Covid as I struggled with the realization that it was time to start thinking about retirement. I thought it might be a piece for CineMontage, the Motion Picture Editor’s Guild magazine. (As a story analyst, I’m a member that union local.) But as it became increasingly philosophical, that no longer seemed appropriate. Meanwhile, it never quite worked as I hoped it would. And so like so many other things, it went on the shelf.

I was in college when I first saw the 1950 Billy Wilder film Sunset Boulevard. A budding cinephile classmate learned it was on a local S.F. Bay Area station and convinced one of the few dorm residents with a TV to let a group of us pile into his room to watch it. Despite the endless commercial breaks (this was, after all, the early, pre-VCR 1970s), I was mesmerized by Wilder’s comic noir look at the intersection of Hollywood desperation and narcissism.

The film tells the tale of unemployed screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden), who, evading car repo men, stumbles upon the crumbling mansion of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a once famous silent film star rendered obscure by the talkies. Certain that fans are pining for her return, Norma has penned a thousand-page comeback screenplay and asks Joe to give it a read. Joe finds it execrable, but sees an opportunity and manipulates Norma into hiring him to “whip it into shape.” Before he knows it, he has become Norma’s kept man, a boy-toy she showers with lavish gifts, and of whom she becomes increasingly possessive. Along with her ex-director butler Max (Erich Von Stronheim), Joe enables Norma’s delusion of a return to the caress of the camera and the adoration of those “out there in the dark.”

A small but pivotal player in this sordid Hollywood melodrama is Betty Schafer (Nancy Olson), a script reader at Paramount and fiancée of Joe’s assistant director pal Artie Green (Jack Webb). Movies about Hollywood rarely portray the low-level employees who read and analyze mounds of material for studio execs and producers.   But these readers – or “Story Analysts” as they are officially known in the classification of the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) – have been at the bedrock of the business since the silent era, and still are. Betty is an iconic representation of the profession, one easily recognized by anyone who’s had the job.   She experiences a reader’s worst nightmare-turn-reality when she first meets Joe: she trashes his script to her producer boss only to discover he’s right behind her and has heard every dismissive word. She also voices many a reader’s frustrated ambition when she tells Joe: “I don’t want to be a reader all my life, I want to write.”

Betty disses Joe’s treatment to producer Sheldrake

As a 19-year-old boy watching on a small, grainy TV, I was particularly struck by Betty Schafer — and not just because of an attraction to luminous girl-next-door actress Olson. Like Betty, who was raised a stone’s throw from the Paramount lot where both her parents worked, I too was a child of Hollywood. My father was a sound editor at 20th Century Fox. My mother had been personal secretary to legendary film producer Alexander Korda. Like Betty, I burned with a desire to take the town by storm.

A college grad a few years later, I landed my first job in the business as an “office assistant” (read “office boy”) at a TV production company that, in an auspicious coincidence, was officed on… you guessed it… Sunset Boulevard.   Among my duties was delivering the mail. Every morning I pushed a cart with letters, packages and trade papers down the long corridor that wrapped around the 10^th floor suite. In the lonely, mostly vacant and completely ignored end of the corridor was a young woman named Diana. In response to my inquiry, she revealed she was the company’s reader. “Betty Shafer, Sunset Boulevard,” I chimed, delighted to have found a flesh-and-blood version of the scrappy celluloid reader with whom I had been so taken. Like many young Hollywood wannabes when they first discover that people actually get paid to read scripts, I thought this might be the gig for me. Diana kindly showed me samples of her work. Seven months later when the company was shuttered by its corporate parent, I offered to read for free for the yet-to-be-financed firm being born of its ashes. It turned out I had a knack for it… and a career in story development was born.

In Norma-bought white tie,. Joe shows up at Artie’s New Year Eve’s party…

It took a couple of years of part-time reading work cobbled with assorted PA (production assistant) jobs before I landed a full-time union gig as a story analyst. It took less time than that to start feeling Betty’s impatience with the work, and to be itching to be writing scripts, not just opinions about them. Every fellow young reader had the same arrogant hunger, if not to be a writer, then a director or producer. If only given a chance, we’d all be brilliant.   And we all swore we’d never end up as “career readers,” i.e. men or women who never got beyond what we saw as an entry-level job and were still reading into their 50s or 60s.   We’d look at colleagues like that with respect for their skill and experience, but with an underlying pity and scorn.

… where he and Betty discover and attraction.

Laboring away on my own writing nights and weekends, I soon had an agent and a script that was getting attention, but also a baby and a mortgage.   So, when the big screenwriting break didn’t come, I seized an opportunity and got on the studio executive path, another thing I had sworn I’d never do.   Climbing the ranks, I was soon a vice-president at MGM and a “player” in the mold of Tim Robbins in the 1992 film. I was so convinced I’d never again be a reader, I cashed out my union pension. MGM in the late 1980s, unfortunately, was being endlessly sold and bought back again. By the time I finally left the crippled studio with a buyout, I realized that I really wasn’t happy as an executive and revived my old writer ambitions. Needing a day job, I dusted off my union card and went back to work as a story analyst. Hollywood ego being what it is, I wasn’t about to admit to a return to such low-level grunt work.   For a good while I read under a pseudonym, the name “Michael Rouse” serving as cover for my shame.

I had some small successes as a screenwriter, but the big break again failed to come. A tumultuous two-year return to executive at a small production company had me fleeing back to the low stress reading with a sigh of relief. Then, before I knew it, I realized I had become one of those career readers I once pitied.   My life, however, was far from pitiable. I had a comfortable gig at a stable 20^th Century Fox with a great boss, brilliant colleagues and a corps of smart, personable executives who valued my work. Yet a sense of failure lingered. In telling people what I was doing for a living, I was always quick to add what I had done, i.e. that I was once an exec, not just a reader. Indeed, there was a bit of Norma Desmond in me, still clinging to when I was a “somebody” in this town. (“I’m still big, it’s the pictures that got small.”) The ambitions, expectations and prejudices of youth were hard to shake, even with the maturity and wisdom of age.

“I don’t want to be a reader all my life. I want to write.”

In Sunset Boulevard, Betty and Joe secretly collaborate on a script… and fall in love. But no happy ending is in store of them. When Norma discovers their liaison and menaces Betty in a late night phone call, a self-loathing Joe rejects Betty to set her free, then packs to leave Norma, and Hollywood, forever. This leads Norma to shoot him in the back as he walks out the door, the act that produces the famous pool-floating corpse that’s been narrating the tale.

I often wondered what happened to Betty after that nightmarish dismissal by Joe in Norma’s flamboyant living room — after she went home to cry her heart out only to wake up the next morning to the sensational news of Joe’s murder at Norma’s hands. Did she follow Joe’s advice and get on a bus to Arizona to marry Artie? And what about her and Joe’s script? Did it find a life anywhere? Or, forever tainted by the Norma Desmond scandal, was it condemned to the shelf?

I ask such questions because now, as a career reader with retirement on the horizon, I find myself still struggling with those gnawing feelings of failure, those waves of “what if” musings and regrets, the belief I didn’t live up to my potential, that maybe, if I only had made different decisions or been a little tougher, I’d have an Oscar or Emmy on my shelf rather than a pile of unproduced screenplays. So I wonder how Betty, after the heartbreak of losing Joe and the career she dreamed of, weathered similar feelings. Twenty-two years old in 1950, Betty would be only eighty-seven today.

Where are you, Betty Schafer?

If she actually existed and I could find her, what advice would she have for me?

This question rings within me enough that, in my mind, I embark upon a imagined search for my celluloid mentor.

I start at the union office.   There I make two discoveries: One is that Betty returned to reading at Paramount in 1957, remaining there for thirty-three years until she retired in 1990. The second is that she did so under the name “Elizabeth Schaefer Green.” So she did marry Artie!

Joe and Betty work on their script late at night in Betty’s office.

From there it’s on to the Paramount story department, where I find Sylvia, a still spry 75-year-old in Story Files who started at Paramount as a secretary in 1977 and had an office in the same building as Betty. I learn from her that Betty and Artie divorced, but not before there were two kids. As the oft-unemployed Artie wasn’t the best at child support, Betty needed a job, and so she called up Paramount and got her old gig back.

As they still exchange Christmas Cards, Sylvia has an address for Betty in Portland, Oregon, where she moved after retiring to be closer to children and grandchildren.

I write an awkward letter to Betty, introducing myself, explaining how she inspired me and offering to fly up to Portland if she’ll be so kind as to meet. She writes back an enthusiastic “yes” and I’m soon on a plane, palms sweating as if I’m off to meet Katherine Hepburn, not a fellow reader.

Taking a break from writing on the Paramount back lot.

We meet at her favorite coffeehouse down the street from Powell’s bookstore. The older Betty is wrinkled and white haired, but still a beauty, those doe eyes sparkling as they did when she and Joe Gillis realized an attraction over spiked punch at Artie New Year’s Eve party. I babble and feel incoherent, but she is grace personified.

I tell her my story, confessing the lingering sense of failure over ending up a career reader. She laughs. After returning to reading, she too again tried to make the jump to screenwriting, and has a drawer full of unproduced scripts to prove it. She too struggled with that gnawing feeling of having missed the boat.

Then she looks me in the eye and tells me such thoughts are bullshit.

“Don’t dwell on what you failed to do,” she orders me, “but what you accomplished, which, if you take the time to think about it, is quite a lot. And I’m not talking about all your unproduced screenplays, but what you’ve done — and are doing — as a reader.

Betty receives a disturbing call from Norma.

“Every day is a creative one; that’s a gift. You retell stories, which is a special talent. You get to take them apart and see how they work; that’s fun. And while it might not seem that anyone is paying attention to what you have to say, they are, even if they don’t know it. You’ve had a lot of influence, Chris, more than you can possibly imagine.”

At this point in my fantasy, I realize that it’s not Betty who is telling me these things, but myself. I realize that this make-believe has been a conversation between two sides of myself – one that still thinks he’s a failure, and the other that knows better but believes he needs to defer. Betty Schafer, I now know, is not just an iconic movie character, but a part of me. When I followed her lead into the movie business, she became a symbol for me, not just of my ambitions and confidence, but of my doubts and insecurities.

The question is whether I’m going to hear what she is saying… and heed her advice. Maybe.

Joe confesses he’s been Norma’s kept man… and tells Betty to marry Artie.

And then, back in the fantasy, Betty tells me she’s got to run. It’s the day of her “film club” – a group of elderly cinephiles like herself who religiously go to the movies together once a week.   That day’s matinee starts in an hour. We step out of the coffeehouse. I give her a clumsy hug. She tells me to keep in touch. I promise to do so, but both of us know this was a onetime deal.   I wait outside the coffeehouse for my Lyft to the airport as she heads down the block on arthritic knees.

As she disappears around the corner, I think how she has shone the light for me, both into a Hollywood career… and now, perhaps, out of it. And I whisper…

“Thank you, Betty…”
MGM 1986

June 5th, 2023

In the 1980s, I had the privilege of working at MGM and its legendary Culver City studio. I started as a reader (story analyst) and rose in the ranks, leaving as a Vice President of Production. When it came to management and ownership, it was a tumultuous decade, especially in 1985-1986 when owner Kirk Kerkorian sold the company to wannabe media mogul Ted Turner only to buy back the production company (but not the library or studio lot) when Turner realized he had bitten off more than he could chew. I wrote this soon after us MGM staffers were moved off the studio lot into a new office building across the street.

I first started at MGM in 1980. As a reader, I had worked at a number of studios, but I knew I was someplace special the first time I walked down the hall to the men’s room and spotted the large black and white still from THE WIZARD OF OZ. You could almost smell the history in the Irving Thalberg building. My first office was tucked in a weird little corner next to the first-floor door of Louis B. Mayer’s private elevator. Stepping into the Story Department research room was like stepping into the past, three crowded desks surrounded by a towering assemblage of army green card file cabinets housing records that detailed author and title for submissions dating back to 1919. My first piece of “previous coverage” (synopsis and comment done by an earlier reader) was dated 1938. We were still expected to make a carbon copy of our coverage, a holdover from the days when “Xerox” was not yet a household word. As there wasn’t enough space for all of the files, across from my office there were wooden library card catalogue cabinets piled almost to the ceiling, the cards cross-referencing submissions by subject. When we readers got bored, we would look up everything from cows to war and marvel at the variety of scripts written about each, and the hours put in by clerks to keep track of them.

The MGM history, however, was evidenced in other ways. Studio heads and their administrations came and went — Begelman, Fields, Yablans, Ladd — yet somehow the place always stayed the same. The sense of history — and, more important, the tradition — remained intact. They could remodel the Commissary, exchanging the old walnut walls of the executive dining room with sleek blue formica and vinyl, but it didn’t really change.

Alan Ladd Jr. in his packed up office. Courtesy of Wendy Dytman.

It didn’t take me long to realize the reason for this were the people who worked there – waitresses, busboys, cooks, janitors, security guards. Many of them had been working on the lot twenty to thirty years, doing their jobs with a long-developed sense of duty and loyalty. There was Millie, the sun-glassed custodian of the Thalberg first floor, whose shift started at 5:30 every evening and who always had a “Good Night” for me, even after I got promoted and left her floor for the executive offices on the third. Millie remembered the occupants of offices from years back and would talk of them with fondness. And there was Benny, the short order cook in the Cub Room, who sang while he served up the day’s specials and threw burgers on the grill with the grace of Astaire. A few feet away from him was Mary, the Irish cashier, who would ask: “And how are you today, darling” with her Gaelic lilt and bring a smile to your face no matter how overworked or harried you might be. Yes, studio heads and their staffs came and went, but the Millies, the Bennys and the Marys remained, and with them the MGM tradition.

Only now things have changed.

Having purchased it as part of the chaotic Turner acquisition, Lorimar Telepictures took possession of the studio lot. The MGM film posters on the Thalberg third floor were removed, leaving only empty frames. The commissary and janitorial staffs were laid off, replaced by less expensive employees of maintenance and food service contractors. In the Commissary, strange, young faces were now taking orders and delivering iced teas. And in the Thalberg building, Millie was no longer there to say “good night” as I left in the evening. Meanwhile, we MGM employees packed up for our move to the new Filmcorp building across the street. As boxes piled up in offices, people wandered the halls with cameras, snapping pictures in a futile attempt to preserve what once was and could never be again.

Story Department Files being packed up. Courtesy of Wendy Dytman.

My office is now across the street in a modern tribute to glass and granite. The carpet wreaks of newness and a thin film of construction dust will linger for months. The Story Department files have made the journey with us, but they look lost in a modern room of wall-to-wall glass. We are happy to be here. The novelty of the building helps us to look towards the future. After a year of corporate turmoil, we are making movies again; excitement and enthusiasm is in the air.

Alive on our stationary, Leo the MGM lion will continue to roar at the beginning of our movies, letting it be known that a tradition is being kept alive. But if you look closely, you’ll see a hint of sadness in his eyes, sadness at the passing of an era…

Fall 1986
RIDING FREIGHTS: Chapter 1

May 20th, 2023

Licensed via Adobe Stock

“Setting Off”

It began in Santa Barbara, California, in August of 1971. With friends Mike and Steve, I was off to ride freight trains to the Pacific Northwest.   While we lived in Los Angeles, we knew we mustn’t catch our first train there. Mike had learned from previous experience that, with its railroad police, the massive rail yard of Los Angeles was too risky of a place to hop onto a train. It would be safer to get on in the small coastal city to the north, where the freights always stopped and there were only two directions they could possibly go – north or south.

But first we had to get to Santa Barbara, which meant hitching a ride from our homes in the San Fernando Valley. This tied in perfectly with the cover story we had told our parents, which was that we were hitchhiking up to Santa Clara, where I was attending college, to visit friends. Only nineteen years old and still very much children in our parents’ eyes, we couldn’t very well reveal to them our actual — and potentially dangerous – plans.   Indeed, my father even disapproved of our thumbing, offering to lend us a car so we could drive. I deferred, telling him that hitchhiking was the whole point of the adventure, and that, because there were three of us, we’d be perfectly safe. He accepted this with reluctance.

Some context about the era might be helpful. While technically the 1970s, it was still very much the 1960s, especially when it came to hitchhiking, which was almost as easy as taking a bus, and in many ways, easier. Back then it was unusual to spot a freeway onramp – or a highway junction with a good shoulder – that didn’t have at least one person sticking out their thumb.   In San Francisco, just past St. Mary’s Cathedral, Gough Street merged onto the “Central Freeway,” a connector route via which one could take US 101 toward San Jose or Interstate 80 across the Bay to Berkeley. (Damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, this short stretch of freeway no longer exists.) On the block before Gough turned into those 101 and 80 onramps, there was always at least twenty hitchhikers holding out signs or thumbs — from hippies to rough-looking drifters to long-haired but clean-cut college kids. You never had to wait there more than a few minutes for a ride. especially if you were headed across the Bay. Drivers would pull over, roll down the window and shout out “Berkeley,” prompting a run on the car. Filled up and doors closed, the car would pull back into traffic and head onto the freeway, leaving those left out to wait for the next “bus.”

(Hitchhiking back to Santa Clara one time from this very spot, I was picked up and robbed. But that’s another story.)

In suburban Encino, the northbound 101 Balboa Boulevard onramp on which we began our journey wasn’t so convenient.   Since there were three of us, we had to wait a while for a driver with the room and the inclination to pull over. But we eventually got lucky and managed to get up to Santa Barbara in just two rides. Dropped off where the 101 then ran through downtown as a surface street (and was a hitchhiking mecca like Gough Street in San Francisco), we walked down State Street to the Art Deco train station a few blocks away.

The three of us had been classmates at the all-boys Catholic high school, Crespi Carmelite. We all lived in Encino neighborhoods that, once middle-class, are now among LA’s toniest. Alphabetical seating meant that, with last names that began with “BL” and “BO,” Mike and I sat next to each other in every class as freshmen and quickly became best friends. We were both children of the film business. My dad was a sound editor. Mike’s was a screenwriter who would soon pen an iconic bestselling novel. By junior year, Mike and I were making 8mm movies together and were key members of the drama club. My connection with Steve went back to elementary school and Boy Scouts. He was the eldest of eight children.   His dad was an engineer. In senior year, his house burned down from an electrical fire. While it was rebuilt, his family lived in a motel on Sepulveda Boulevard in deep Van Nuys.   Unlike me, Steve was an athlete who played football and ran track. But while our high school paths went in different directions, our grade school bond held fast and we remained friends. When, come Christmas of senior year, Mike proposed that he and I go camping in Yosemite, I suggested we invite Steve to join us. That mishap-filled but resoundingly fun trip made us a trio and had us resolving to go on more adventures together.   The previous Christmas we had gone to Death Valley. And now it was freight trains.

Riding freights was Mike’s idea… and a typical one at that. The summer of 1969 he had gone on a crazy cross-country adventure, the primary goal of which was to be at Cape Canaveral for the launch of Apollo 11. He and his companion – an older friend from another school – succeeded in this, but were also caught by police sneaking into a restricted area to get a closer view. If ever there was a stunt that defined Mike, this was one. When he got a notion in his head, he’d obsessively pursue it with little thought to illegality, danger or ramification. This unique combination of fearless and foolhardy defined him.

The previous summer Mike had ridden freights with the same friend. As such he was not only the instigator of our trip, but the expert upon whom neophytes Steve and I were dependent. It was one thing to get onto a train, it was another to learn where it was going. Rail workers were knowledgeable and could be helpful, but there was a risk to that. The preferred method was to ask the hobos who rode the freights on a daily basis. It there was a book, they had learned every trick in it. Needless to say, the people to be avoided were the “bulls,” i.e. the railroad police, whose job was to keep riders off the trains and arrest them if necessary.

At Mike’s urging, we were traveling super light – nothing but the clothes on our backs and a sleeping bag. No toiletries, no water bottle, no personal items, not even a toothbrush. If Mike had learned anything on his previous experience, it was that, climbing in and out of box cars or running to get onto a moving train, you couldn’t be bogged down with luggage.

Licensed via Adobe Stock

When we arrived at the Santa Barbara station, there was a freight train parked there, its long of line of cars disappearing around a bend to the south.   While its engines were pointed north, there was no indication it was actually headed that way, or when it might depart.   We walked down the line hoping to find a hobo or worker with information. We soon came across two relatively clean-cut young men like ourselves sitting in a nook in the bushes that grew along the track.   They had learned from a hobo that this train was heading north and was supposed to leave soon. We consequently sat down and joined them for the wait. Phil was tall and stocky. Short and slim, Jay was his exact opposite. Starting their senior year of college in the fall, they had hitchhiked from their home in St. Louis and were headed to Portland, where a friend lived.   As this would be their first time hopping a freight, they had a certain apprehension and were pleased to learn that Mike had experience. Given the strength in numbers, there was an unspoken agreement that we’d ride this train together.

Needless to say, an empty open box car is the preferred berth on a freight. The only trouble with this train was that there weren’t any. Every box car was closed and locked up tight. Having walked the length of the train, Phil and Jay could attest to this. We discussed this problem and decided that our only alternative was to climb aboard one of the piggyback flat cars.   Designed to carry two semi-truck trailers, these were flat cars with equipment that held down the trailer tires and landing gear. We had our choice of several that were resting a few feet from our waiting place.

We didn’t have to wait long. After about thirty minutes, a jolt coursed through the cars as the engine, which was about ten cars up, started pulling. We jumped up and climbed onto the nearest piggyback, instinctively crowding around the one of the semi’s tires in a futile attempt to not be seen. In a box car, we could have hidden. On this piggyback we were visible to the world.   And since the train was taking us right through the station, we were afraid we’d be spotted, ordered off, or worse, arrested. Our fears proved to be unfounded. As the train crept past the small terminal, no one paid us the slightest attention. Once we were clear, I not only relaxed, but was filled with euphoria.   I was actually riding a freight train!

To describe this first ride as exhilarating would be a vast understatement. I can’t recall another time where I’ve been so wide-eyed and excited, so incredibly grateful to be alive and having an experience.   The piggyback turned out to be the freight equivalent of a glass doomed passenger car, affording a virtual 360° view. Yes, one was exposed to the wind generated at 60 mph, but this was California in the summer and hardly unpleasant. And if the wind got too much, one could find shelter behind the truck tires.

We were passing through an especially scenic part of California. Ten or so miles north of Santa Barbara, the tracks – paralleling highway 101 — run atop bluffs right above the ocean. And while cars and trucks on the 101 are forced to turn inland at Gaviota, the railroad continues straight up the coast of the rugged Lompoc peninsula, going right through the middle of Vandenberg Air Force Base, from which satellites were launched and ICBMs tested. We were thus soon amazed to find ourselves rolling by rocket launch pads and blockhouses. Incredulous that the military allowed such passage through such a high security area, we kept expecting to be spotted and for military police to swoop in and nab us. Not only did that never happen, we didn’t see a single person the whole time we were on the base.

It was around four or five o’clock afternoon when the train pulled into San Luis Obispo and slowed to a stop. The position of our piggyback car in the line meant that it came to a halt smack dab in the center in the passenger station, leaving us in full view of everyone there. If ever there was a time we’d be caught, this was it. We sat nervously, wishing we’d somehow become invisible. We might as well have been. Again, astoundingly, no one cared a dot that we were there. When the train started moving again, we found ourselves waving to people as we pulled out of the station.   As some waved back, I was sure they were doing so with admiration and envy. Perched on that piggyback car with my friends, I was living a kind of American Dream. Freight riding was proving to be a thoroughly positive adventure. Little did I know what was waiting for us a few miles up the tracks…
RIDING FREIGHTS: Chapter 2

May 20th, 2023

Licensed via Adobe Stock

“Tunnels”

Just north of San Luis Obispo, both the 101 and the railroad are forced to climb over the Santa Lucia Mountain Range via the Cuesta Pass, which, at 1522 feet, isn’t high, but is a short, steep climb up from San Luis Obispo.   Trains unable to go up the sharp grade that an automobile can, the tracks take a long and circuitous route up the hill, first heading west out of town to pass a men’s prison before beginning a series of long looping turns. Our progress was slow, but fascinating, and a marked contrast between the speedy flight up the coast. This trip only seemed to be getting better and better.

Then we came to our first tunnel…

While not gushing the black smoke of the old coal-powered steam engines that famously pulled trains across the plains, diesel engines emit a huge amount of exhaust, especially while laboring to pull a mile-long train up a steep grade. When a diesel engine goes through a tunnel, most of that exhaust is trapped in it, lingering as the cars follow.   This we discovered when our train went through the first tunnel and we found ourselves plunged not just into blackness, but into a cauldron of toxic fumes that stung our eyes and had us coughing and gagging. With this suffocation came the realization that our “observation car” had a serious drawback – it left us totally exposed to the exhaust fumes. We would have been far better off in a box car, the enclosure of which would have kept the air relatively clean.

This first tunnel was mercifully short — it wasn’t too long before we burst back out into the light and fresh air.   But it scared the hell out of us. Having driven over the pass in a car and seen trains winding their way up, I knew there were several more tunnels, and longer ones at that. Having survived the first, we could probably survive the rest. But there was a possible scenario that was absolutely terrifying. What if, for some reason, the train came to a stop with our piggyback inside a tunnel? Like someone attempting suicide inside a garage with a running car, we’d pass out and die.

In the span of thirty minutes, our freight train adventure had gone from blissful to nightmarish. As we plunged into the second tunnel, we pulled out our jackets and wrapped them around our heads in an attempt to keep the fumes out. This worked… to a degree. It kept the worse of the poisonous air at bay, but the longer the tunnel the shorter the protection. I kept waiting for the squeal of brakes that would indicate that the engineer was bringing the train to a halt. When we emerged from each tunnel, we’d whip the jackets off our head and breathe in the cleaner air, grateful that we had made it through another tunnel, girding ourselves for the next one.

There were six tunnels in total. The last was the longest and most agonizing. When we got through it – and the tracks turned downhill indicting we had made it over the pass – we began to relax. We had survived the harrowing experience. And it was hard to imagine anything that could be worse.

From the pass, the railroad tracks descend into the Salinas Valley, paralleling its eponymous river and never venturing far from the 101. We flew through towns like Atascadero and Paso Robles, barely slowing down. But just past San Miguel, the train decelerated, pulled onto a siding and came to a grinding halt. Having no idea why we stopped or how long we’d be there, we climbed down off our piggyback, grateful to get off the vehicle we had been riding for six hours, and on which we could have died. The first thing we did was relieve ourselves onto the rocks by the tracks.

Still boys at heart, we entertained ourselves with rock throwing competitions. We were intrigued with the army base (Camp Roberts) that was visible across the 101, which ran only a hundred or so feet away. The train having stopped on a curve, the engines were clearly visible ten or so cars ahead.   As we could see it, so could anyone on them see us.   For a while I worried that the engineers would be descending to come detain us or order us to leave the train. Only they never appeared. It was becoming increasingly obvious that rail workers simply didn’t care if anyone was illegally riding the freights.

By now it was around seven or eight in the evening. The summer-brown agricultural landscape was ablaze with magic hour light and the air was still warm from what had been a hot day.   (We were inland now and no longer cooled by ocean breeze.) There was something idyllic about the respite from our journey, I found myself feeling unusually happy and content. Having no control over the train or when it would begin moving again, we had to give into the moment and enjoy it.

The reason for our stop became apparent when a southbound passenger train came roaring by on the adjacent track. Our train clearly had been ordered to pull over to allow the passenger to pass, perhaps because, somewhere ahead, there was only one track that had to be shared. Sensing we’d soon be moving on, we climbed back onto our piggyback. And, sure enough, with a lurch, our train resumed its journey.

The sun soon went down. Unable to see much of the country in the dark — and exhausted after a long and eventful day — we laid out our sleeping bags, crawled into them and quickly fell asleep. I remember waking up when the train made a brief stop in a station. Sitting up to see where we were, I spotted a station sign for “Watsonville.” Having a college friend who lived in that town, I wondered what he was up to as we rolled through his home.

I fell back asleep and, while occasionally roused by the flashing red lights of crossings, or ever-shifting train noise, didn’t fully wake up again until the train was making its slow way through the rail yards that run from downtown San Jose to the adjacent city of Santa Clara.   As this area was my second home, I recognized landmarks and was able to tell my companions where we were and where I thought we were going. By now it was around one AM. We were all eager to get off the train as soon as we could and find something to eat. None of us having eaten since breakfast, we were starving. As if the engineer had read our minds, the train came to a stop not just near the end of the yards in Santa Clara, but a few hundred feet away from the Santa Clara train station, from which I had often caught the Caltrain to San Francisco. I knew exactly where we were… and exactly where we going to eat.

Bidding goodbye to our piggyback, we climbed off it. I led the group up to nearby Santa Clara University and “Big Bic’s,” a Denny’s-like diner just off campus that, a late-night hangout for students, stayed open until two AM. Late as it was, there was still a fair number of customers in the place, from whom we drew stares as we burst in and crowded into a booth. After we ordered from a leery waitress, we made our way to the restroom. Peering in the mirror, we realized why we had commanded such looks from the clientele. Our faces were almost black from the dust of the road and the soot from the tunnels. Our hands were also shockingly dirty. With lots of water and soap from the dispenser, we scrubbed ourselves as best we could, leaving a grimy ring of scum on the sink. Refreshed and somewhat respectable, we returned to our tables to devour burgers, fries and large cokes.

Once we were sated, talk turned to what to do next. Given the day’s highs and lows, I felt I had my full of freight riding for the day. Without confessing this feeling, I revealed that I was good friends with a Santa Clara student couple (John and Sandy) who had just got married (I had been an usher at their wedding) and that they’d surely let us crash on their living room floor. The others, however, weren’t interested in this. Everyone, especially Mike, wanted to get back on a train and continue on. And so, after we paid the bill, I led the way back to the station and the yards.   Coming upon a rail worker – and no longer fearing them – we asked which freight was headed north. He pointed to one that, after a stop in Oakland, would continue on to Marysville and up the Sacramento Valley towards Oregon. Walking along this train, we found ourselves an open. empty box car, climbed in, roll out our bags and settled down for the night. I briefly awoke when the train pulled out.   Falling back asleep, I didn’t wake up until it was daylight and the train was rolling slowly through the Oakland rail yards. As the worker had said, the train came to a stop in the yard on one of seven or eight tracks packed with freight cars of all types. Mike had heard that one should be wary of bulls in Oakland, so we stayed in our boxcar and out of sight, hoping the train would soon resume its journey. We waited… and waited… and waited… only for the train to remain stationary and quiet. Increasingly impatient, we began to wonder if it was ever going to move on. After some debate, we decided we should walk up to the front and see what we could glean. Taking our belongings, the five of us climbed out of the car and made our way up the track only to discover that, at the head of the train, there was no engine at all…
RIDING FREIGHTS: Chapter 3

May 20th, 2023

Licensed via Adobe Stock

“Dump Truck”

We stared at the engine-less front of the train for a minutes or so, not quite comprehending what it meant. But soon we came out of daze and addressed our predicament. If this train was going north, it might not do so for hours… or days. And there was a good chance that the rail worker in Santa Clara hadn’t know what he was talking about, and that the cars on this train had come to Oakland to be divided up and sent in all different directions.

Wary of hanging around this yard too long and inviting detection by the bulls, we decided to get out of it, make our way to a freeway and hitch a ride out of town, getting back onto a freight in some smaller town. (Mike had heard Marysville might be good for this.) Setting out, we got out of the yard without incident and, rather miraculously, came upon an onramp for the westbound Interstate 80 within a few minutes.

As there were five of us hitching, we knew it was unlikely that anyone would stop to pick up all of us, and we debated the likelihood that we’d have to split up back into our original pair and trio. But, again miraculously, within a hour two men in a small dump truck spotted us, pulled over, revealed they were going to Redding and offered to take us the whole way if we didn’t mind riding in the empty bed. Located on Interstate 5 at the top of the Sacramento Valley where it gave way to Mt. Shasta and the Cascades, Redding was on the rail line and a perfect stop for us. We eagerly said yes and climbed up into the dump bed, which was essentially a large metal bathtub. The truck pulled back onto the onramp and we were on our way.

As with the piggyback, this was a unique ride with which we were initially thrilled. At sixty miles an hour, there was a pretty intense air flow, but you could avoid most of it by hunkering down at the front of the bed behind the cab. The views were amazing. We couldn’t help but feel as if we experiencing something unique.

This luster began to wear off once we got thirty or forty miles inland away from the coast and into the Valley. The weather was hot – easily over 100 degrees. Add the air flow and it like being in a convection oven.   The bigger problem was that, in the open bed, we were completely exposed to the blazing sun. We were also sitting on metal that, also exposed, was heating up. I couldn’t help but wonder just how hot it would get in the time it took for us to get to Redding. Had we accepted a ride in a frying pan?

By two hours into the journey, our ride had become tedious… and a little concerning. Our benefactors had passed us a bottle of water through the rear cab window, but it didn’t go far and we were dehydrating.   With every mile it seemed to get hotter. We huddled down behind the cab, trying to find what shelter we could from wind and sun. At last, the truck pulled off the freeway onto the business route through Redding. One of those digital thermometers on a bank sign – popular at the time – read 113°. Knowing that we’d be thirsty and hungry, the drivers pulled over in front of a supermarket. We scrambled out of the bed and down onto the ground. A bit wobbly and faint, we beelined to the market. I can’t remember what food we bought. All I remember is buying a half gallon of cold orange juice and, the second we were outside, drinking it down in practically one gulp.

I don’t know who suggested we get to Lake Shasta and go for a swim, but hot and dirty as we were, that sounded like a fantastic idea. So once again we stuck out our thumbs. I can’t tell you who picked us up, but we got to a swimming beach on the lake with a parking lot and picnic tables. We stripped down to our underwear and plunged in, washing off the soot of the Cuesta grade tunnels and the grime of box car and dump truck. It was heaven. It was now about seven or eight o’clock at night. The sun was going down and the lake glowed.   It was still 100° out, but we didn’t care as we floated in the cool waters. Mike, Steve and Phil swam to a nearby island. Jay and I just chilled.

Drying out in the hot air after our swim, we struck up a conversation with a man who had driven down to the beach and was sitting on a picnic table enjoying a cigarette. I don’t remember his name, but I’ll call him “Pete.” He was in his mid-20s. A resident of Redding, he had gotten off work and felt like coming down to the lake. He was intrigued by our adventure and asked questions about freight riding. Quite hungry now, we asked where we might get a bite. He responded by offering to drive us – in his V-8 muscle car — into town to a place he knew. This proved to be a car hop drive-in that, straight out of “American Graffiti,” was packed with every teenager in Redding. Car radios blared, engines revved and girls and boys flirted. A regular, Pete greeted — and was greeted by — virtually everyone there. We were granted a special status by the fact that we were with him. A female carhop brought us burgers and fries, which we devoured while sitting on the hood of Pete’s car soaking up the scene.

By now our new best friend, Pete seemed anxious to not let us leave and tried to convince us to spend the night at his place, but we were eager to resume our journey. And so, meal consumed, Pete drove us to the Redding train station and bid us goodbye. By now it was around 11 PM. The station wasn’t much: two main tracks, three or four sidings and a small passenger terminal. It was empty and quiet. While there was some cars on sidings, there was no sign of any train that might be leaving. Not far from the terminal was a government building with a small lawn. Exhausted, we rolled out our sleeping bags on the grass and flopped down, laying on top because it was still incredibly hot. Figuring we’d be awakened by the noise if a train came in, we drifted off.

Licensed via Adobe Stock

It was around one in the morning when we were awakened by the clanging of the crossing signal at the road that passed through the yard. As this was a sure sign, we jumped up, rolled up our bags as fast as we could and moved into position near the main track, ready to take advantage of the arriving train. Sure enough, a northbound freight came rumbling into the station yard. And it had a number of open box cars. Great! Only it was moving at a good clip. Not super-fast, maybe 10-15 mph, but not a speed that suggested it was coming to a halt. As we watched it clank by, it quickly became obvious that it was not going to stop, but just pass on through.

As we exchanged nervous looks, Mike expressed what we were all thinking.

“It’s not going to stop. We have to run for it.” The idea of this terrified me, but I said nothing. Nor did anyone else.   For a few seconds, we stood frozen, knowing what we had to do but afraid to commit to doing it. Then Mike shouted “Come on” and took off running alongside the train. Having no other choice, the rest of us took off after him…
RIDING FREIGHTS: Chapter 4

May 20th, 2023

Licensed from Adobe Stock

“Separated”

Here’s the thing about boxcars: Their wheels are huge – three feet in diameter. As it sits about eighteen inches above these wheels, the floor of a boxcar is about four and half feet above the rails. That means that, if you are six feet tall and standing at the door of an open box car, the floor is about even with your chest. The shorter you are, the higher up it is.    It is one thing to push up yourself from the ground into the car when it is standing still. It’s another to do it when it’s moving at 10 mph and you’re running to keep up.

Proving himself to be the quite the athlete, Phil quickly passed Mike and took the lead in the race to get on the train. Mike was next, and then there was me. I had no idea where Steve and Jay were behind me. Running all out to keep up, I looked at the height of the box cars and was convinced I’d never be able to get into one. I’d never had much upper body strength… and that’s what was required.

The train was moving just enough slower that the three of us were able to pull even with an open box car.   Phil threw his pack into it, then deftly hoisted himself in. Mike quickly and fearlessly followed suit. Now it was my turn. The moment of truth had come. Convinced I wouldn’t be able to do it — and that I’d fall and be crushed beneath the wheels – I began to talk myself out of it.   Looking down at me, Mike sensed this.

“Come on, Chris, you can do it,” he yelled. “Throw me your bag.”

I am not, by nature, a courageous sort, especially when it comes to acts of physical derring-do. But I somehow managed to suppress my terror. I threw Mike the bag. He grabbed it, threw it deeper into the car, and once again urged me on. I moved up to the open door, placed my hands firmly on the box car floor… and jumped, pushing myself up with every ounce of strength I could muster.

Mike grabbed me by the shoulders and hauled me up and in. I tell you right now, if he hadn’t done so, I think I would have failed to come all the way up and would have dropped back down to the side of track.

But that hadn’t happened. I was in the box car. I was safe. I was alive. I had succeeded at the ultimate freight train riding challenge!

While I sat on the box car floor counting my blessings, Mike and Phil were peering out the box car door, looking down the train to see what had become of Steve and Jay.   Only the tracks had begun to curve such that the view down the train was cut off. We had no idea whether they had gotten on or not.

Clear of the Redding station, the train appreciably picked up speed. Passing through a long tunnel, it emerged to fly along a trestle that crossed Lake Shasta. A spectacular sight. Moving as fast as it did, it wasn’t long before the train approached Dunsmuir, a small town about fifty miles north of Redding which, Mike somehow knew, was a significant freight stop. We were hoping the train would stop there and that we could reunite with Steve and Jay. To our delight, the train slowed, slowed, slowed… and came to a screeching halt.

Mike announced that, while Phil and I remained in the box car, he would go back and find Jay and Steve, bringing them up to join us.   Phil and I agreed and Mike, slipping off the car, disappeared into the darkness.

In hindsight, this was the absolutely wrong thing to do. We never should have separated. The three of us should have gone together to search for the other two. Alas, we were young and didn’t have much sense. The correct course of action never occurred.

Phil and I anxiously waited for five, maybe ten minutes. Then, with a loud bang, the train jerked forward, signaling the resumption of its journey. In the same instant, we thought we heard someone shout “Chris.” We might have heard a second shout, but if there was one, it was drowned out by the escalating groans and clangs of the train as it strove to move forward.   If that was Mike calling, what was he trying to say? That he had found Steve and Jay and the three of them were together in another car? Or that he hadn’t and we needed to get off ? After debating the options, Phil and I felt it was best to stay put. If we got off the train now as it picked up speed, we might not be able to get back on. But we didn’t feel good about the decision. We had no idea whether we were traveling with our friends… or being taken away from them.

https://www.vecteezy.com/free-photos”>Free Stock photos by Vecteezy

Figuring we could be traveling for a while, we rolled out our bags and went to sleep. I awakened at one point to look out the door and see that it was framing Mt. Shasta as it glowed in the light of a full moon. A stunning sight I’ll never forget. When I next awoke, it was a bright, sunny and warm morning. The train was slowing as it pulled into Klamath Falls, a small Oregon city just over the California border. The train stopped in a wide-open rail yard packed with all sorts of freight cars. There was a small passenger terminal and a short row of commercial buildings.

We got out, looking down the row of cars hoping to see Mike, Steve and Jay emerging from one. A joyful reunion, however, was not to be. It quickly became apparent that they were not on the train and that we were on their own.

What were we to do?   Continue on? Or catch a train back to Dunsmuir? Phil was adamant that we journey on to Portland. That’s where he and Jay were originally headed, and they both had the address of their friend there.   He believed that, given the separation, Jay would somehow get to that Portland address, bringing Mike and Steve along with him. We should do the same. I agreed. It was our only real option.

One of the businesses in the row of commercial buildings was a small cafe. Hoping the train wouldn’t leave, we went to it and bought what we could get to go, then returned to our box car. As had been the case in every railyard so far, nobody paid us any attention. With the punctuality of a passenger train, the freight soon pulled out.

From Klamath Falls, the railroad goes north through the Klamath basin before cutting west to climb into the Cascades, passing over them at Cascade Summit (4885’) to descend into the Willamette River Valley. Our journey over this route was an exercise in tedium. Not only did the train move at a snail’s pace as it lumbered up grades and snaked around endless curves, it constantly stopped for no apparent good reason.   Add the 100+ degree heat and it was thoroughly unpleasant.    Phil and I were bored out of our minds, especially given that the wild and desolate mountains weren’t particularly attractive or interesting.

When the train was moving — and the tracks curved a certain way — we could see that, about ten cars down, a small group of men were riding in an open box car. They were too far away to be identified, either as hobos or freight train “tourists” like ourselves. The sight of them filled me with a vague apprehension. Mike having shared tales of freight riders being attacked or robbed, I was well aware that this was a danger. These unidentified men were an uncomfortable reminder of the potential for it. On all of previous rides, we sensed that we were the only people on the train. Now it was disconcerting to know we weren’t.

When the train stopped, Phil and I would get off to urinate, throw rocks or gorge on the blackberries that grew everywhere along the track.   I was always anxious for the train to start moving again, not just because I was desperate to get out of these hot, dusty mountains, but because I didn’t want the men from that other box car coming down to introduce themselves.

Our agony was ended once the train made it over the pass and headed down towards the Willamette at a decent clip. By the time we pulled into the city of Eugene, it was around seven in the evening. It had taken us ten to eleven hours to cover a route you could do in three hours by car.

The rail yard in Eugene was vast. I can’t remember who we asked, but we were pointed towards a track with a train that would soon be departing to Portland. As we headed towards it, we came upon a young man in his twenties who had long blonde hair tied in a ponytail. We’ll call him “Greg.” He too was headed to Portland, and glad to learn which train was going there, joined us. As we walked, we learned he had not only been on the same train as us over the Cascades, but in the box car we spotted down the line from ours. And he had a horror story to tell. One of the hobos with him in the car had attempted to rob him while he slept. Awakening, Greg fought off the man, in the process breaking a tooth. (He showed us the now jagged canine.) While thankful the altercation with the hobo hadn’t been worse, Greg was bummed by his tooth and fretting over how he would find a dentist to repair it. I silently thanked God that we hadn’t ended up in the car with those hoboes.

Licensed via Adobe Stock

The three of us found an empty box car on the Portland-bound train, which set off fifteen minutes later. Paralleling the Willamette River and Interstate 5, from Eugene the tracks make a flat, straight run to Portland.   On them this freight was a veritable bullet train. It immediately accelerated to 60-70 mph and never slowed down.

What would prove to be the last leg of my freight riding, this was hands down the best one.   The sun was setting and it was gorgeous out. Legs dangling, we sat in the box car door, watching Oregon go by. We zipped by farms, schools, parks, backyards, and playgrounds. At endless road crossings, cars lined up behind flashing gates, waiting for us to pass. Children would spot us in our box car and, enthralled, excitedly wave. We’d wave back. We were the movie stars of the railroad on parade before our fans. I can’t describe just how joyful I felt on this ride. I was acutely aware of being part of an amazing world, and was so grateful for this unique way to experience it.

It took us only two hours to get to Portland. It was dark by now. As the train slowly entered the rail yard, we remembered Mike’s warning about the bulls and jumped off, making our way across numerous tracks, up a slope, through a fence and out onto a street. As Greg needed a place to stay, Phil invited him to come along with us to his friend’s place, for which he had the address but no idea where it might actually be.    As he also had a phone number, we searched for and found a phone booth. (In the days before cell phones, these were numerous.)   As Greg and I waited outside, Phil entered the booth and called. He emerged a few minutes later to reveal that the friend was coming in his car to pick us up.

He also revealed that Jay had made it to the friend’s house. Only he was alone. Mike and Steve weren’t with him.

My heart sunk. Where were they? What was I going to do without them?

The friend picked us up and brought us to his home, where Jay was waiting. He told us what happened back in Redding. On his own as the last in our line of runners, he failed to get onto the train.   After watching Steve climb onto a car, he didn’t think he could get onto one by himself and gave up.

Jay was clearly resentful about the fact that the four of us had abandoned him.   And we had. In the mad sprint to get onto the train, it was every man for himself, a survival of the fittest in which the smaller and weaker lost out. I could understand his anger and could relate.   If I had been last in line and facing jumping on by myself, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the courage.

Like Phil, Jay knew their ultimate destination in Portland. So at that moment he figured he’d hitchhike there to rendezvous with us. Walking to Interstate 5, he got picked up by a guy in a Porsche who took him all way the way! He’d been at the Portland house since early morning!

I could only deduce that, in Dunsmuir, Mike had found Steve, The two of them must have determined that Jay wasn’t on the train… and made the decision to stay off.   But where were they now…?

Category: Memories

“Dump Truck”

“Separated”